Murder becomes a less exclusive crime with each
passing year. Once it was almost solely the territory
of hardened criminals, with only the occasional
civilian lapsing into a crime of passion. But it seems
that fewer and fewer people are exempt from murderous
thoughts these days.

Perhaps the most shocking crimes are those committed
by children. Do children who kill -- even those who
rigorously plan their attacks -- really understand
what they're doing when they take a life?

That question is at the core of Laura Lippman's fine
mystery Every Secret Thing. The story begins with
two little girls -- shy, overweight Alice Manning and
rebellious, trashy Ronnie Fuller -- getting kicked out
of a birthday party. While walking home, the girls
find a baby left alone in a stroller on the sidewalk
and, figuring she's been abandoned, decide to take
care of the infant. A few days later, the baby is
found suffocated. The girls are arrested, but no clear
version of the story emerges. Both are locked up in
juvenile detention centers until their 18th birthdays.

After their release, another baby goes missing and
fingers begin to point to the two girls. Lippman
cleverly shifts focus throughout the novel, from
Alice to Ronnie to Alice's mother to the detective
who found that first baby years ago to Alice's lawyer
and to the mother of the first baby, still bitter that
her child's killers weren't locked up for life. The
story's structure keeps the true version of the
original murder from emerging until the very end,
making it both shocking, yet strangely inevitable.

Without revealing too much, Lippman clearly believes
that children are just as capable of calculation and
manipulation as anyone else. The only thing that's
different about their crimes, she argues, may be the
way the rest of the world views them.

Every Secret Thing also makes a number of pointed
claims about race, class and money. These are mostly
illustrated through the character of Cynthia Barnes,
the mother of the original baby. Cynthia is black, the
daughter of a respected black judge and living a
financially comfortable life with her husband and new
child. Though her life was deeply affected by the loss
of her first child, she's slightly reluctant to visit
the mother of the latest missing child. Her
hesitation, the book claims, is that she's somewhat
put off by the woman, a poor, low-class white woman
with a racially mixed child, whom she pities but can't
entirely sympathize with.

The complexity of that character is indicative of the
whole tone of the book -- nothing is clear cut,
Lippman argues. There are no easy answers, not about
crime or love or parenting, or even about the right way to
behave. The result is an intelligent book that thrills
its audience without patronizing, which isn't an easy
feat.